When a photograph is taken by a camera, an image is collected by a lens and retained in some medium. Historically, the medium was typically 35 mm or some other type of film. Over the last decade or so, the medium has increasingly become digital memory. Digital cameras have become the preferred camera choice, even for many professional photographers. Digital cameras send captured images “directly” to digital memory. Of course, photographs taken with traditional film cameras can be scanned and converted into digital images. Regardless of the path taken by the image to become digitally-stored, the digital image may be manipulated in different manners for different purposes.
When images are captured outdoors, haze tends to adversely impact the quality of the background. More specifically, weather and other atmospheric phenomena, such as haze, greatly reduce the visibility of distant regions in images of outdoor scenes. Manipulating a digital image to remove the effect of haze, often termed “dehazing”, is a challenging problem. Existing approaches require multiple images that are taken under different weather conditions and/or produce unsatisfactory results.